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The function of Australian mass media seems to be to inveigle listeners into complicity in the terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to 'choose' between distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B.

The ABC has done a great job documenting its Vote Compass Project. However the results highlight the role of the ABC in setting the election issue agenda, despite the fact that the ABC explains: "Vote Compass is not a poll. It is primarily and fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns."

War criminals and serial liars, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, and their Australian accomplices, Prime Minster Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Bob Carr

This coming Saturday 7 September, most Australians will be forced to make the unpalatable choice between, on the one hand, the Opposition Liberal Party and the ruling Labor Party. The Liberal Party is resolved to destroy 7,000 public service jobs, remove the right of trade unions to enter workplaces and give the Green light to destructive and horrifically expensive projects such as the East-West Link and the Phillip Island industrialisation project. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, as well as promoting rampant population growth and section 457 visas has, on the international stage, facilitated military aggression against Libya in 2011 and has done his utmost to repeat the exercise with Syria. Fortunately for Syria and the rest of the world, President Obama's war plans against Syria have been defeated by international and domestic opposition as described in the included article of 30 Aug 2013 by Paul Craig Roberts. It is vital, if peace and democracy are to survive that Kevin Rudd, Bob Carr and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott be held to account for their support for the U.S. Government's criminal actions.

The mainstream media, including the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) no longer disputes that the pretexts used to justify the United States' wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 were lies. Yet, in spite of the appalling consequences, including as many as 3.3 million Iraqi deaths according to onerecentestimate, the SBS has shown itself willing to echo a new series of lies, which have been contrived by the same people responsible for the Iraq War. This time the target is Syria.

Tim Murray reports on a recent Canadian census and the public reaction in a voting poll to uncontrolled population growth. He asks why politicians seem to do the opposite of what the Canadian voters actually want.

The producers of Q and A have their favourites when it comes to “thinktanks”, with the free marketeering IPA topping the list with 4 different panellists and 11 appearances in total (not including appearances by former staff members). Meanwhile, prominent progressive think tank The Australia Institute has never featured on Q&A, despite TAI’s current head Dr Richard Denniss debating Lord Christopher Monckton about climate change at the National Press Club last year and its former head being prominent author and intellectual Professor Clive Hamilton.`````

Despite the near daily news coverage of many poor countries suffering conflict and disaster, critical, underlying issues are almost never mentioned by journalists reporting endless symptoms and predicaments. The issues covered in this article add insight into the key development challenges facing the countries concerned and, by implication, the policies of countries like the US, UK, Australia and Canada, where billions are being spent in aid and military interventions to try and stabilise failing states.

It is surprising to pick up a book about statistics and find that it segues so readily into another about psychopathology in girls. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone takes a revealing look at how wealth is distributed within different developed countries and Reviving Ophelia illustrates the decline of women's rights in the face of aggressive pornography and its effect on girls. Children and the general public were not widely exposed to explicit pornography and sexual sadism in the ‘traditional’ mass media of the industrial age, although these notions were commonly implicit in images and concepts used for marketing all kinds of things. Between that time and now, in 2011, the depiction of women almost exclusively as victims and objects of violence and pornography, explicitly and for that sole reason, has become a global business which operates 24/7. The implicit violence and sexualisation of women in ordinary marketing has also continued. At the same time, the official message is that western women don’t need Feminism anymore because equality has prevailed.

The problem with Mr Murdoch's newspaper empire is not just unethical behaviour by his journalists. It goes much deeper. With the alarming concentration of media ownership in Australia and the advent of PR driven journalism, for the sake of democracy, the public must support independent media. David Donovan comments.

This article explores why Australians are so frustrated with the lack of deep thinkers and serious policy makers in our political establishment. It asks why politicians only discuss peripheral issues and never seriously address homelessness. It comments on some recent flagrantly anti-democratic political acts, including the way LNP leadership has been hired out to Cambell Newman in Queensland. In the spirit of relocalisation, it offers some insights into local power in China.

Anti-growth activists are caught in a vice. In large urban areas bursting at the seams with overtaxed infrastructure, the potent force of the growth lobby and the pervasive influence of the media that supports it makes opposition to the growth juggernaut hazardous to mind, body and spirit. Yet life in a rural locality presents an even more daunting challenge. The costs of growth are not so manifest to those who do not understand its exponential nature. The benefits of fresh air, tranquility and wildlife are taken for granted, and the allure of big city amenities is irresistible. Locals are beguiled by the promise that new development will solve unemployment, increase the supply of affordable housing and keep young people close to hearth and home. To stand up against growth in a small town is to invite ostracism and ridicule from uncomprehending minds that cannot understand why anyone would oppose "progress". The following letter was submitted to the newspaper of one such town, but it could have been the template for letters to almost any small town newspaper in North America or Australia or elsewhere---newspapers which live on the advertising revenue from the businesses that profit from growth.

Try writing to the daily newspaper, or commenting on a Murdoch News Limited newspaper blog or to a Fairfax newspaper blog, or even on an ABC Radio programme blog.

There, feel better? So what have you gained? Well you have perhaps vented spleen, so gained personal gratification. But another day another paper and reader memories are short. Soon the blog comment section will be 'closed' and inaccessible. So what then have you really gained? Has anyone read it? Will what you've written have any impact, even if people did read it? Will your comments contribute in anyway to an issue?

In 1946, US President Truman said, of Australia's contribution to the Allied war effort, "On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having 7 millions, approximately equalled that of United States." Yet, in 2010, Bernard Salt, a supporter of the record high immigration rate being imposed undemocratically by the Rudd Government has, in an article written for Rupert Murdoch's "Australian" newspaper, misrepresented history in an apparent attempt to belittle and diminish this country's proud achievements. Why?

And the new message from the growth lobby is ..... "Yes, we hear your pain and we understand absolutely. No we don't intend to take any notice of your protests." Analysis of ex-ANZ bank economist, Saul Eslake's article, "Populate and Stagnate." in the Fairfax Press (The Age)

This month of February a new mass initiative will kick off marking the event of The Global Population Speak Out 2010 (GPSO 2010), a public discussion on the Issue of Population. see:http://gpso.wordpress.com/2010-actions/

The denial by socialist groups of the material limits of the environment is barely more rational than religious beliefs in life after death. This belief, and the support for high immigration which it entails, has helped the rulers of the UK, for their own selfish short-term ends, to turn their island into a crowded slum on the verge of a catastrophic social and ecological breakdown.

The alternative media is coming up with documentary films of enormous importance. This article points to one about how the US media ruined the chances of a candidate for election in the 1992 US elections.

Many people look forward uncritically to a future not too different from the cartoon-world of the Jetsons, where people have mechanical maids, whiz around in airborne cars, and take space-cruises to asteroids and far off planets. Politics continue benignly and poverty has no place. Political rank is preserved in the form of cheerful paternal talking heads, but the slave and servile ranks have been transformed into machines which cannot feel pain or humiliation. A wealthy, not too intelligent middle-class has inherited this astro-playground and keeps order among itself by switching from child to parent in an artificial recreation of the family and original clan system.